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Artificial intelligence (AI, also machine intelligence, MI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of “intelligent agents”: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1] Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. See glossary of artificial intelligence.

The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring “intelligence” are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”[3] For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from “artificial intelligence”, having become a routine technology.[4] Capabilities generally classified as AI as of 2017[update] include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go[6]), autonomous cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, and interpreting complex data, including images and videos.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism,[7][8] followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an “AI winter”),[9][10] followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding.[8][11] For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.[12] These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. “robotics” or “machine learning”),[13] the use of particular tools (“logic” or “neural networks”), or deep philosophical differences.[14][15][16] Subfields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).[12]

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, explainability and the ability to move and manipulate objects.[13] General intelligence is among the field’s long-term goals.[17] Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, neural networks and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial psychology and many others.

The field was founded on the claim that human intelligence “can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”.[18] This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence, issues which have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.[19] Some people also consider AI to be a danger to humanity if it progresses unabatedly.[20] Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.[21]

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science.[22][11]

While thought-capable artificial beings appeared as storytelling devices in antiquity,[23] the idea of actually trying to build a machine to perform useful reasoning may have begun with Ramon Llull (c. 1300 CE). With his Calculus ratiocinator, Gottfried Leibniz extended the concept of the calculating machine (Wilhelm Schickard engineered the first one around 1623), intending to perform operations on concepts rather than numbers. Since the 19th century, artificial beings are common in fiction, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Karel apek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).[25]

The study of mechanical or “formal” reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in antiquity. The study of mathematical logic led directly to Alan Turing’s theory of computation, which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as “0” and “1”, could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This insight, that digital computers can simulate any process of formal reasoning, is known as the ChurchTuring thesis.[26][pageneeded] Along with concurrent discoveries in neurology, information theory and cybernetics, this led researchers to consider the possibility of building an electronic brain.[27] The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was McCullouch and Pitts’ 1943 formal design for Turing-complete “artificial neurons”.

The field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.[28] Attendees Allen Newell (CMU), Herbert Simon (CMU), John McCarthy (MIT), Marvin Minsky (MIT) and Arthur Samuel (IBM) became the founders and leaders of AI research.[29] They and their students produced programs that the press described as “astonishing”: computers were learning checkers strategies (c. 1954)[31] (and by 1959 were reportedly playing better than the average human),[32] solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems (Logic Theorist, first run c. 1956) and speaking English.[33] By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was heavily funded by the Department of Defense[34] and laboratories had been established around the world.[35] AI’s founders were optimistic about the future: Herbert Simon predicted, “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do”. Marvin Minsky agreed, writing, “within a generation… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”.[7]

They failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the remaining tasks. Progress slowed and in 1974, in response to the criticism of Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from the US Congress to fund more productive projects, both the U.S. and British governments cut off exploratory research in AI. The next few years would later be called an “AI winter”,[9] a period when obtaining funding for AI projects was difficult.

In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems,[37] a form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of human experts. By 1985 the market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan’s fifth generation computer project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research.[8] However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, longer-lasting hiatus began.[10]

In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI began to be used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and other areas.[22] The success was due to increasing computational power (see Moore’s law), greater emphasis on solving specific problems, new ties between AI and other fields and a commitment by researchers to mathematical methods and scientific standards.[38] Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov on 11 May 1997.

Advanced statistical techniques (loosely known as deep learning), access to large amounts of data and faster computers enabled advances in machine learning and perception.[citation needed] By the mid 2010s, machine learning applications were used throughout the world.[citation needed] In a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM’s question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. The Kinect, which provides a 3D bodymotion interface for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One use algorithms that emerged from lengthy AI research[41] as do intelligent personal assistants in smartphones.[42] In March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming the first computer Go-playing system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps.[6][43] In the 2017 Future of Go Summit, AlphaGo won a three-game match with Ke Jie,[44] who at the time continuously held the world No. 1 ranking for two years.[45][46] This marked the completion of a significant milestone in the development of Artificial Intelligence as Go is an extremely complex game, more so than Chess.

According to Bloomberg’s Jack Clark, 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence, with the number of software projects that use AI within Google increased from a “sporadic usage” in 2012 to more than 2,700 projects. Clark also presents factual data indicating that error rates in image processing tasks have fallen significantly since 2011.[47] He attributes this to an increase in affordable neural networks, due to a rise in cloud computing infrastructure and to an increase in research tools and datasets.[11] Other cited examples include Microsoft’s development of a Skype system that can automatically translate from one language to another and Facebook’s system that can describe images to blind people.[47]

The overall research goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner. The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.[13]

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[48] By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[49]

For difficult problems, algorithms can require enormous computational resourcesmost experience a “combinatorial explosion”: the amount of memory or computer time required becomes astronomical for problems of a certain size. The search for more efficient problem-solving algorithms is a high priority.[50]

Human beings ordinarily use fast, intuitive judgments rather than step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model.[51] AI has progressed using “sub-symbolic” problem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the importance of sensorimotor skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the structures inside the brain that give rise to this skill; statistical approaches to AI mimic the human ability to guess.

Knowledge representation[52] and knowledge engineering[53] are central to AI research. Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[54] situations, events, states and time;[55] causes and effects;[56] knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[57] and many other, less well researched domains. A representation of “what exists” is an ontology: the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties formally described so that software agents can interpret them. The semantics of these are captured as description logic concepts, roles, and individuals, and typically implemented as classes, properties, and individuals in the Web Ontology Language.[58] The most general ontologies are called upper ontologies, which attempt to provide a foundation for all other knowledge[59] by acting as mediators between domain ontologies that cover specific knowledge about a particular knowledge domain (field of interest or area of concern). Such formal knowledge representations are suitable for content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery via automated reasoning (inferring new statements based on explicitly stated knowledge), etc. Video events are often represented as SWRL rules, which can be used, among others, to automatically generate subtitles for constrained videos.[60]

Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them.[67] They need a way to visualize the futurea representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change itand be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or “value”) of available choices.[68]

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only system acting in the world, allowing the agent to be certain of the consequences of its actions.[69] However, if the agent is not the only actor, then it requires that the agent can reason under uncertainty. This calls for an agent that can not only assess its environment and make predictions, but also evaluate its predictions and adapt based on its assessment.[70]

Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achieve a given goal. Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.[71]

Machine learning, a fundamental concept of AI research since the field’s inception,[72] is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.[73][74]

Unsupervised learning is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised learning includes both classification and numerical regression. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs in, after seeing a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression is the attempt to produce a function that describes the relationship between inputs and outputs and predicts how the outputs should change as the inputs change. In reinforcement learning[75] the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent uses this sequence of rewards and punishments to form a strategy for operating in its problem space. These three types of learning can be analyzed in terms of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical computer science known as computational learning theory.[citation needed]

Within developmental robotics, developmental learning approaches are elaborated upon to allow robots to accumulate repertoires of novel skills through autonomous self-exploration, social interaction with human teachers, and the use of guidance mechanisms (active learning, maturation, motor synergies, etc.).[76][77]

A common method of processing and extracting meaning from natural language is through semantic indexing. Although these indexes require a large volume of user input, it is expected that increases in processor speeds and decreases in data storage costs will result in greater efficiency.

Machine perception[83] is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, tactile sensors, sonar and others) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision[84] is the ability to analyze visual input. A few selected subproblems are speech recognition,[85] facial recognition and object recognition.[86]

The field of robotics[87] is closely related to AI. Intelligence is required for robots to handle tasks such as object manipulation[88] and navigation, with sub-problems such as localization, mapping, and motion planning. These systems require that an agent is able to: Be spatially cognizant of its surroundings, learn from and build a map of its environment, figure out how to get from one point in space to another, and execute that movement (which often involves compliant motion, a process where movement requires maintaining physical contact with an object).[90]

Affective computing is the study and development of systems that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science. While the origins of the field may be traced as far back as the early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard’s 1995 paper on “affective computing”.[97][98] A motivation for the research is the ability to simulate empathy, where the machine would be able to interpret human emotions and adapts its behavior to give an appropriate response to those emotions.

Emotion and social skills[99] are important to an intelligent agent for two reasons. First, being able to predict the actions of others by understanding their motives and emotional states allow an agent to make better decisions. Concepts such as game theory, decision theory, necessitate that an agent be able to detect and model human emotions. Second, in an effort to facilitate humancomputer interaction, an intelligent machine may want to display emotions (even if it does not experience those emotions itself) to appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction.

A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (the philosophical psychological perspective) and practically (the specific implementation of systems that generate novel and useful outputs).

Many researchers think that their work will eventually be incorporated into a machine with artificial general intelligence, combining all the skills mentioned above and even exceeding human ability in most or all these areas.[17][100] A few believe that anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial brain may be required for such a project.[101][102]

Many of the problems above also require that general intelligence be solved. For example, even specific straightforward tasks, like machine translation, require that a machine read and write in both languages (NLP), follow the author’s argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the author’s original intent (social intelligence). A problem like machine translation is considered “AI-complete”, but all of these problems need to be solved simultaneously in order to reach human-level machine performance.

There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree about many issues.[103] A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence by studying psychology or neurology? Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering?[14] Can intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems?[15] Can intelligence be reproduced using high-level symbols, similar to words and ideas? Or does it require “sub-symbolic” processing?[16] John Haugeland, who coined the term GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence), also proposed that AI should more properly be referred to as synthetic intelligence,[104] a term which has since been adopted by some non-GOFAI researchers.

Stuart Shapiro divides AI research into three approaches, which he calls computational psychology, computational philosophy, and computer science. Computational psychology is used to make computer programs that mimic human behavior.[107] Computational philosophy, is used to develop an adaptive, free-flowing computer mind.[107] Implementing computer science serves the goal of creating computers that can perform tasks that only people could previously accomplish.[107] Together, the humanesque behavior, mind, and actions make up artificial intelligence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of researchers explored the connection between neurology, information theory, and cybernetics. Some of them built machines that used electronic networks to exhibit rudimentary intelligence, such as W. Grey Walter’s turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. Many of these researchers gathered for meetings of the Teleological Society at Princeton University and the Ratio Club in England.[27] By 1960, this approach was largely abandoned, although elements of it would be revived in the 1980s.

When access to digital computers became possible in the middle 1950s, AI research began to explore the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was centered in three institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford and MIT, and each one developed its own style of research. John Haugeland named these approaches to AI “good old fashioned AI” or “GOFAI”.[108] During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level thinking in small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background.[109] Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the goal of their field.

Economist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s.[110][111]

Unlike Newell and Simon, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate human thought, but should instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem solving, regardless of whether people used the same algorithms.[14] His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning.[112] Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming.[113]

Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert)[114] found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad-hoc solutions they argued that there was no simple and general principle (like logic) that would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their “anti-logic” approaches as “scruffy” (as opposed to the “neat” paradigms at CMU and Stanford).[15] Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat’s Cyc) are an example of “scruffy” AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time.[115]

When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications.[116] This “knowledge revolution” led to the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the first truly successful form of AI software.[37] The knowledge revolution was also driven by the realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI applications.

By the 1980s progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers began to look into “sub-symbolic” approaches to specific AI problems.[16] Sub-symbolic methods manage to approach intelligence without specific representations of knowledge.

This includes embodied, situated, behavior-based, and nouvelle AI. Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.[117] Their work revived the non-symbolic viewpoint of the early cybernetics researchers of the 1950s and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body (such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.

Interest in neural networks and “connectionism” was revived by David Rumelhart and others in the middle of the 1980s.[118] Neural networks are an example of soft computing — they are solutions to problems which cannot be solved with complete logical certainty, and where an approximate solution is often sufficient. Other soft computing approaches to AI include fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation and many statistical tools. The application of soft computing to AI is studied collectively by the emerging discipline of computational intelligence.[119]

In the 1990s, AI researchers developed sophisticated mathematical tools to solve specific subproblems. These tools are truly scientific, in the sense that their results are both measurable and verifiable, and they have been responsible for many of AI’s recent successes. The shared mathematical language has also permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics or operations research). Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig describe this movement as nothing less than a “revolution” and “the victory of the neats”.[38] Critics argue that these techniques (with few exceptions) are too focused on particular problems and have failed to address the long-term goal of general intelligence. There is an ongoing debate about the relevance and validity of statistical approaches in AI, exemplified in part by exchanges between Peter Norvig and Noam Chomsky.

In the course of 60 or so years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below.

Many problems in AI can be solved in theory by intelligently searching through many possible solutions:[127] Reasoning can be reduced to performing a search. For example, logical proof can be viewed as searching for a path that leads from premises to conclusions, where each step is the application of an inference rule.[128] Planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis.[129] Robotics algorithms for moving limbs and grasping objects use local searches in configuration space.[88] Many learning algorithms use search algorithms based on optimization.

Simple exhaustive searches[130] are rarely sufficient for most real world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use “heuristics” or “rules of thumb” that prioritize choices in favor of those that are more likely to reach a goal, and to do so in a shorter number of steps. In some search methodologies heuristics can also serve to entirely eliminate some choices that are unlikely to lead to a goal (called “pruning the search tree”). Heuristics supply the program with a “best guess” for the path on which the solution lies.[131] Heuristics limit the search for solutions into a smaller sample size.

A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.[132]

Evolutionary computation uses a form of optimization search. For example, they may begin with a population of organisms (the guesses) and then allow them to mutate and recombine, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation (refining the guesses). Forms of evolutionary computation include swarm intelligence algorithms (such as ant colony or particle swarm optimization)[133] and evolutionary algorithms (such as genetic algorithms, gene expression programming, and genetic programming).[134]

Logic[135] is used for knowledge representation and problem solving, but it can be applied to other problems as well. For example, the satplan algorithm uses logic for planning[136] and inductive logic programming is a method for learning.[137]

Several different forms of logic are used in AI research. Propositional or sentential logic[138] is the logic of statements which can be true or false. First-order logic[139] also allows the use of quantifiers and predicates, and can express facts about objects, their properties, and their relations with each other. Fuzzy logic,[140] is a version of first-order logic which allows the truth of a statement to be represented as a value between 0 and 1, rather than simply True (1) or False (0). Fuzzy systems can be used for uncertain reasoning and have been widely used in modern industrial and consumer product control systems. Subjective logic[citation needed] models uncertainty in a different and more explicit manner than fuzzy-logic: a given binomial opinion satisfies belief + disbelief + uncertainty = 1 within a Beta distribution. By this method, ignorance can be distinguished from probabilistic statements that an agent makes with high confidence.

Default logics, non-monotonic logics and circumscription[62] are forms of logic designed to help with default reasoning and the qualification problem. Several extensions of logic have been designed to handle specific domains of knowledge, such as: description logics;[54] situation calculus, event calculus and fluent calculus (for representing events and time);[55] causal calculus;[56] belief calculus;[141] and modal logics.[57]

Many problems in AI (in reasoning, planning, learning, perception and robotics) require the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of powerful tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics.[142]

Bayesian networks[143] are a very general tool that can be used for a large number of problems: reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm),[144] learning (using the expectation-maximization algorithm),[145] planning (using decision networks)[146] and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks).[147] Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing and finding explanations for streams of data, helping perception systems to analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters).[147]

A key concept from the science of economics is “utility”: a measure of how valuable something is to an intelligent agent. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis,[148] and information value theory.[68] These tools include models such as Markov decision processes,[149] dynamic decision networks,[147] game theory and mechanism design.[150]

The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (“if shiny then diamond”) and controllers (“if shiny then pick up”). Controllers do, however, also classify conditions before inferring actions, and therefore classification forms a central part of many AI systems. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine a closest match. They can be tuned according to examples, making them very attractive for use in AI. These examples are known as observations or patterns. In supervised learning, each pattern belongs to a certain predefined class. A class can be seen as a decision that has to be made. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that observation is classified based on previous experience.[151]

A classifier can be trained in various ways; there are many statistical and machine learning approaches. The most widely used classifiers are the neural network,[152] kernel methods such as the support vector machine,[153] k-nearest neighbor algorithm,[154] Gaussian mixture model,[155] naive Bayes classifier,[156] and decision tree.[157] The performance of these classifiers have been compared over a wide range of tasks. Classifier performance depends greatly on the characteristics of the data to be classified. There is no single classifier that works best on all given problems; this is also referred to as the “no free lunch” theorem. Determining a suitable classifier for a given problem is still more an art than science.[158]

Neural networks are modeled after the neurons in the human brain, where a trained algorithm determines an output response for input signals.[159] The study of non-learning artificial neural networks[152] began in the decade before the field of AI research was founded, in the work of Walter Pitts and Warren McCullouch. Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron, a learning network with a single layer, similar to the old concept of linear regression. Early pioneers also include Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko, Teuvo Kohonen, Stephen Grossberg, Kunihiko Fukushima, Christoph von der Malsburg, David Willshaw, Shun-Ichi Amari, Bernard Widrow, John Hopfield, Eduardo R. Caianiello, and others.

The main categories of networks are acyclic or feedforward neural networks (where the signal passes in only one direction) and recurrent neural networks (which allow feedback and short-term memories of previous input events). Among the most popular feedforward networks are perceptrons, multi-layer perceptrons and radial basis networks.[160] Neural networks can be applied to the problem of intelligent control (for robotics) or learning, using such techniques as Hebbian learning, GMDH or competitive learning.[161]

Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm, which had been around since 1970 as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa,[162][163] and was introduced to neural networks by Paul Werbos.[164][165][166]

Hierarchical temporal memory is an approach that models some of the structural and algorithmic properties of the neocortex.[167]

In short, most neural networks use some form of gradient descent on a hand-created neural topology. However, some research groups, such as Uber, argue that simple neuroevolution to mutate new neural network topologies and weights may be competitive with sophisticated gradient descent approaches. One advantage of neuroevolution is that it may be less prone to get caught in “dead ends”.[168]

Deep learning is any artificial neural network that can learn a long chain of causal links. For example, a feedforward network with six hidden layers can learn a seven-link causal chain (six hidden layers + output layer) and has a “credit assignment path” (CAP) depth of seven. Many deep learning systems need to be able to learn chains ten or more causal links in length.[169] Deep learning has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and others.[170][171][169]

According to one overview,[172] the expression “Deep Learning” was introduced to the Machine Learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986[173] and gained traction after Igor Aizenberg and colleagues introduced it to Artificial Neural Networks in 2000.[174] The first functional Deep Learning networks were published by Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and V. G. Lapa in 1965.[175][pageneeded] These networks are trained one layer at a time. Ivakhnenko’s 1971 paper[176] describes the learning of a deep feedforward multilayer perceptron with eight layers, already much deeper than many later networks. In 2006, a publication by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov introduced another way of pre-training many-layered feedforward neural networks (FNNs) one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then using supervised backpropagation for fine-tuning. Similar to shallow artificial neural networks, deep neural networks can model complex non-linear relationships. Over the last few years, advances in both machine learning algorithms and computer hardware have led to more efficient methods for training deep neural networks that contain many layers of non-linear hidden units and a very large output layer.[178]

Deep learning often uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs), whose origins can be traced back to the Neocognitron introduced by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980.[179] In 1989, Yann LeCun and colleagues applied backpropagation to such an architecture. In the early 2000s, in an industrial application CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US.[180] Since 2011, fast implementations of CNNs on GPUs have won many visual pattern recognition competitions.[169]

CNNs with 12 convolutional layers were used in conjunction with reinforcement learning by Deepmind’s “AlphaGo Lee”, the program that beat a top Go champion in 2016.[181]

Early on, deep learning was also applied to sequence learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs)[182] which are in theory Turing complete[183] and can run arbitrary programs to process arbitrary sequences of inputs. The depth of an RNN is unlimited and depends on the length of its input sequence; thus, an RNN is an example of deep learning.[169] RNNs can be trained by gradient descent[184][185][186] but suffer from the vanishing gradient problem.[170][187] In 1992, it was shown that unsupervised pre-training of a stack of recurrent neural networks can speed up subsequent supervised learning of deep sequential problems.[188]

Numerous researchers now use variants of a deep learning recurrent NN called the long short-term memory (LSTM) network published by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber in 1997.[189] LSTM is often trained by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC).[190] At Google, Microsoft and Baidu this approach has revolutionised speech recognition.[191][192][193] For example, in 2015, Google’s speech recognition experienced a dramatic performance jump of 49% through CTC-trained LSTM, which is now available through Google Voice to billions of smartphone users.[194] Google also used LSTM to improve machine translation,[195] Language Modeling[196] and Multilingual Language Processing.[197] LSTM combined with CNNs also improved automatic image captioning[198] and a plethora of other applications.

Control theory, the grandchild of cybernetics, has many important applications, especially in robotics.[199]

AI researchers have developed several specialized languages for AI research, including Lisp,[200] Prolog,[201] Python,[citation needed] and C++.[202]

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a general procedure to test the intelligence of an agent now known as the Turing test. This procedure allows almost all the major problems of artificial intelligence to be tested. However, it is a very difficult challenge and at present all agents fail.[203]

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.[citation needed]

For example, performance at draughts (i.e. checkers) is optimal,[citation needed] performance at chess is high-human and nearing super-human (see computer chess:computers versus human) and performance at many everyday tasks (such as recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into something) is sub-human.

A quite different approach measures machine intelligence through tests which are developed from mathematical definitions of intelligence. Examples of these kinds of tests start in the late nineties devising intelligence tests using notions from Kolmogorov complexity and data compression.[204] Two major advantages of mathematical definitions are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

A derivative of the Turing test is the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). As the name implies, this helps to determine that a user is an actual person and not a computer posing as a human. In contrast to the standard Turing test, CAPTCHA is administered by a machine and targeted to a human as opposed to being administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A computer asks a user to complete a simple test then generates a grade for that test. Computers are unable to solve the problem, so correct solutions are deemed to be the result of a person taking the test. A common type of CAPTCHA is the test that requires the typing of distorted letters, numbers or symbols that appear in an image undecipherable by a computer.

AI is relevant to any intellectual task. Modern artificial intelligence techniques are pervasive and are too numerous to list here. Frequently, when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence; this phenomenon is described as the AI effect.

With social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people and news organisations increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating distribution,[211] major publishers now use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to post stories more effectively and generate higher volumes of traffic.[212]

There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence. The main areas promoted are: general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, robotic cars, robot soccer and games.

Artificial intelligence is breaking into the healthcare industry by assisting doctors. According to Bloomberg Technology, Microsoft has developed AI to help doctors find the right treatments for cancer.[213] There is a great amount of research and drugs developed relating to cancer. In detail, there are more than 800 medicines and vaccines to treat cancer. This negatively affects the doctors, because there are too many options to choose from, making it more difficult to choose the right drugs for the patients. Microsoft is working on a project to develop a machine called “Hanover”. Its goal is to memorize all the papers necessary to cancer and help predict which combinations of drugs will be most effective for each patient. One project that is being worked on at the moment is fighting myeloid leukemia, a fatal cancer where the treatment has not improved in decades. Another study was reported to have found that artificial intelligence was as good as trained doctors in identifying skin cancers.[214] Another study is using artificial intelligence to try and monitor multiple high-risk patients, and this is done by asking each patient numerous questions based on data acquired from live doctor to patient interactions.[215]

According to CNN, there was a recent study by surgeons at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington which successfully demonstrated surgery with an autonomous robot. The team supervised the robot while it performed soft-tissue surgery, stitching together a pig’s bowel during open surgery, and doing so better than a human surgeon, the team claimed.[216] IBM has created its own artificial intelligence computer, the IBM Watson, which has beaten human intelligence (at some levels). Watson not only won at the game show Jeopardy! against former champions,[217] but, was declared a hero after successfully diagnosing a women who was suffering from leukemia.[218]

Advancements in AI have contributed to the growth of the automotive industry through the creation and evolution of self-driving vehicles. As of 2016, there are over 30 companies utilizing AI into the creation of driverless cars. A few companies involved with AI include Tesla, Google, and Apple.[219]

Many components contribute to the functioning of self-driving cars. These vehicles incorporate systems such as braking, lane changing, collision prevention, navigation and mapping. Together, these systems, as well as high performance computers, are integrated into one complex vehicle.[220]

Recent developments in autonomous automobiles have made the innovation of self-driving trucks possible, though they are still in the testing phase. The UK government has passed legislation to begin testing of self-driving truck platoons in 2018.[221] Self-driving truck platoons are a fleet of self-driving trucks following the lead of one non-self-driving truck, so the truck platoons aren’t entirely autonomous yet. Meanwhile, the Daimler, a German automobile corporation, is testing the Freightliner Inspiration which is a semi-autonomous truck that will only be used on the highway.[222]

One main factor that influences the ability for a driver-less automobile to function is mapping. In general, the vehicle would be pre-programmed with a map of the area being driven. This map would include data on the approximations of street light and curb heights in order for the vehicle to be aware of its surroundings. However, Google has been working on an algorithm with the purpose of eliminating the need for pre-programmed maps and instead, creating a device that would be able to adjust to a variety of new surroundings.[223] Some self-driving cars are not equipped with steering wheels or brake pedals, so there has also been research focused on creating an algorithm that is capable of maintaining a safe environment for the passengers in the vehicle through awareness of speed and driving conditions.[224]

Another factor that is influencing the ability for a driver-less automobile is the safety of the passenger. To make a driver-less automobile, engineers must program it to handle high risk situations. These situations could include a head on collision with pedestrians. The car’s main goal should be to make a decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrians and saving the passengers in the car. But there is a possibility the car would need to make a decision that would put someone in danger. In other words, the car would need to decide to save the pedestrians or the passengers.[225]The programing of the car in these situations is crucial to a successful driver-less automobile.

Financial institutions have long used artificial neural network systems to detect charges or claims outside of the norm, flagging these for human investigation. The use of AI in banking can be traced back to 1987 when Security Pacific National Bank in USA set-up a Fraud Prevention Task force to counter the unauthorised use of debit cards. Programs like Kasisto and Moneystream are using AI in financial services.

Banks use artificial intelligence systems today to organize operations, maintain book-keeping, invest in stocks, and manage properties. AI can react to changes overnight or when business is not taking place.[226] In August 2001, robots beat humans in a simulated financial trading competition.[227] AI has also reduced fraud and financial crimes by monitoring behavioral patterns of users for any abnormal changes or anomalies.[228]

The use of AI machines in the market in applications such as online trading and decision making has changed major economic theories.[229] For example, AI based buying and selling platforms have changed the law of supply and demand in that it is now possible to easily estimate individualized demand and supply curves and thus individualized pricing. Furthermore, AI machines reduce information asymmetry in the market and thus making markets more efficient while reducing the volume of trades. Furthermore, AI in the markets limits the consequences of behavior in the markets again making markets more efficient. Other theories where AI has had impact include in rational choice, rational expectations, game theory, Lewis turning point, portfolio optimization and counterfactual thinking.

In video games, artificial intelligence is routinely used to generate dynamic purposeful behavior in non-player characters (NPCs). In addition, well-understood AI techniques are routinely used for pathfinding. Some researchers consider NPC AI in games to be a “solved problem” for most production tasks. Games with more atypical AI include the AI director of Left 4 Dead (2008) and the neuroevolutionary training of platoons in Supreme Commander 2 (2010).[230][231]

Displayed in the 2017 Venice Biennale, Adam de Neige’s piece The Machine Was a Ball, and I was a Cold Star uses artificial intelligence designed to create stories. Intended to get more complex over the course of the exhibition, the program also displayed portions of videos to accompany the story.[232]

A platform (or “computing platform”) is defined as “some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run”. As Rodney Brooks pointed out many years ago, it is not just the artificial intelligence software that defines the AI features of the platform, but rather the actual platform itself that affects the AI that results, i.e., there needs to be work in AI problems on real-world platforms rather than in isolation.

A wide variety of platforms has allowed different aspects of AI to develop, ranging from expert systems such as Cyc to deep-learning frameworks to robot platforms such as the Roomba with open interface.[234] Recent advances in deep artificial neural networks and distributed computing have led to a proliferation of software libraries, including Deeplearning4j, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.

Collective AI is a platform architecture that combines individual AI into a collective entity, in order to achieve global results from individual behaviors.[235][236] With its collective structure, developers can crowdsource information and extend the functionality of existing AI domains on the platform for their own use, as well as continue to create and share new domains and capabilities for the wider community and greater good.[237] As developers continue to contribute, the overall platform grows more intelligent and is able to perform more requests, providing a scalable model for greater communal benefit.[236] Organizations like SoundHound Inc. and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have used this collaborative AI model.[238][236]

A McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of 1.5 million highly trained data and AI professionals and managers[239] and a number of private bootcamps have developed programs to meet that demand, including free programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs like General Assembly.[240]

Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have established a non-profit partnership to formulate best practices on artificial intelligence technologies, advance the public’s understanding, and to serve as a platform about artificial intelligence.[241] They stated: “This partnership on AI will conduct research, organize discussions, provide thought leadership, consult with relevant third parties, respond to questions from the public and media, and create educational material that advance the understanding of AI technologies including machine perception, learning, and automated reasoning.”[241] Apple joined other tech companies as a founding member of the Partnership on AI in January 2017. The corporate members will make financial and research contributions to the group, while engaging with the scientific community to bring academics onto the board.[242][236]

Artificial intelligence (AI, also machine intelligence, MI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of “intelligent agents”: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.[1] Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. See glossary of artificial intelligence.

The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring “intelligence” are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”[3] For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from “artificial intelligence”, having become a routine technology.[4] Capabilities generally classified as AI as of 2017[update] include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go[6]), autonomous cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, and interpreting complex data, including images and videos.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism,[7][8] followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an “AI winter”),[9][10] followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding.[8][11] For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.[12] These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. “robotics” or “machine learning”),[13] the use of particular tools (“logic” or “neural networks”), or deep philosophical differences.[14][15][16] Subfields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).[12]

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, explainability and the ability to move and manipulate objects.[13] General intelligence is among the field’s long-term goals.[17] Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, neural networks and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial psychology and many others.

The field was founded on the claim that human intelligence “can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”.[18] This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence, issues which have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.[19] Some people also consider AI to be a danger to humanity if it progresses unabatedly.[20] Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.[21]

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science.[22][11]

While thought-capable artificial beings appeared as storytelling devices in antiquity,[23] the idea of actually trying to build a machine to perform useful reasoning may have begun with Ramon Llull (c. 1300 CE). With his Calculus ratiocinator, Gottfried Leibniz extended the concept of the calculating machine (Wilhelm Schickard engineered the first one around 1623), intending to perform operations on concepts rather than numbers. Since the 19th century, artificial beings are common in fiction, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Karel apek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).[25]

The study of mechanical or “formal” reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in antiquity. The study of mathematical logic led directly to Alan Turing’s theory of computation, which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as “0” and “1”, could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This insight, that digital computers can simulate any process of formal reasoning, is known as the ChurchTuring thesis.[26][pageneeded] Along with concurrent discoveries in neurology, information theory and cybernetics, this led researchers to consider the possibility of building an electronic brain.[27] The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was McCullouch and Pitts’ 1943 formal design for Turing-complete “artificial neurons”.

The field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.[28] Attendees Allen Newell (CMU), Herbert Simon (CMU), John McCarthy (MIT), Marvin Minsky (MIT) and Arthur Samuel (IBM) became the founders and leaders of AI research.[29] They and their students produced programs that the press described as “astonishing”: computers were learning checkers strategies (c. 1954)[31] (and by 1959 were reportedly playing better than the average human),[32] solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems (Logic Theorist, first run c. 1956) and speaking English.[33] By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was heavily funded by the Department of Defense[34] and laboratories had been established around the world.[35] AI’s founders were optimistic about the future: Herbert Simon predicted, “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do”. Marvin Minsky agreed, writing, “within a generation… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”.[7]

They failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the remaining tasks. Progress slowed and in 1974, in response to the criticism of Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from the US Congress to fund more productive projects, both the U.S. and British governments cut off exploratory research in AI. The next few years would later be called an “AI winter”,[9] a period when obtaining funding for AI projects was difficult.

In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems,[37] a form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of human experts. By 1985 the market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan’s fifth generation computer project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research.[8] However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, longer-lasting hiatus began.[10]

In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI began to be used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and other areas.[22] The success was due to increasing computational power (see Moore’s law), greater emphasis on solving specific problems, new ties between AI and other fields and a commitment by researchers to mathematical methods and scientific standards.[38] Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov on 11 May 1997.

Advanced statistical techniques (loosely known as deep learning), access to large amounts of data and faster computers enabled advances in machine learning and perception.[citation needed] By the mid 2010s, machine learning applications were used throughout the world.[citation needed] In a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM’s question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. The Kinect, which provides a 3D bodymotion interface for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One use algorithms that emerged from lengthy AI research[41] as do intelligent personal assistants in smartphones.[42] In March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming the first computer Go-playing system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps.[6][43] In the 2017 Future of Go Summit, AlphaGo won a three-game match with Ke Jie,[44] who at the time continuously held the world No. 1 ranking for two years.[45][46] This marked the completion of a significant milestone in the development of Artificial Intelligence as Go is an extremely complex game, more so than Chess.

According to Bloomberg’s Jack Clark, 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence, with the number of software projects that use AI within Google increased from a “sporadic usage” in 2012 to more than 2,700 projects. Clark also presents factual data indicating that error rates in image processing tasks have fallen significantly since 2011.[47] He attributes this to an increase in affordable neural networks, due to a rise in cloud computing infrastructure and to an increase in research tools and datasets.[11] Other cited examples include Microsoft’s development of a Skype system that can automatically translate from one language to another and Facebook’s system that can describe images to blind people.[47]

The overall research goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner. The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.[13]

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[48] By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[49]

For difficult problems, algorithms can require enormous computational resourcesmost experience a “combinatorial explosion”: the amount of memory or computer time required becomes astronomical for problems of a certain size. The search for more efficient problem-solving algorithms is a high priority.[50]

Human beings ordinarily use fast, intuitive judgments rather than step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model.[51] AI has progressed using “sub-symbolic” problem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the importance of sensorimotor skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the structures inside the brain that give rise to this skill; statistical approaches to AI mimic the human ability to guess.

Knowledge representation[52] and knowledge engineering[53] are central to AI research. Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[54] situations, events, states and time;[55] causes and effects;[56] knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[57] and many other, less well researched domains. A representation of “what exists” is an ontology: the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties formally described so that software agents can interpret them. The semantics of these are captured as description logic concepts, roles, and individuals, and typically implemented as classes, properties, and individuals in the Web Ontology Language.[58] The most general ontologies are called upper ontologies, which attempt to provide a foundation for all other knowledge[59] by acting as mediators between domain ontologies that cover specific knowledge about a particular knowledge domain (field of interest or area of concern). Such formal knowledge representations are suitable for content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery via automated reasoning (inferring new statements based on explicitly stated knowledge), etc. Video events are often represented as SWRL rules, which can be used, among others, to automatically generate subtitles for constrained videos.[60]

Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them.[67] They need a way to visualize the futurea representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change itand be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or “value”) of available choices.[68]

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only system acting in the world, allowing the agent to be certain of the consequences of its actions.[69] However, if the agent is not the only actor, then it requires that the agent can reason under uncertainty. This calls for an agent that can not only assess its environment and make predictions, but also evaluate its predictions and adapt based on its assessment.[70]

Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achieve a given goal. Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.[71]

Machine learning, a fundamental concept of AI research since the field’s inception,[72] is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.[73][74]

Unsupervised learning is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised learning includes both classification and numerical regression. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs in, after seeing a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression is the attempt to produce a function that describes the relationship between inputs and outputs and predicts how the outputs should change as the inputs change. In reinforcement learning[75] the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent uses this sequence of rewards and punishments to form a strategy for operating in its problem space. These three types of learning can be analyzed in terms of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical computer science known as computational learning theory.[citation needed]

Within developmental robotics, developmental learning approaches are elaborated upon to allow robots to accumulate repertoires of novel skills through autonomous self-exploration, social interaction with human teachers, and the use of guidance mechanisms (active learning, maturation, motor synergies, etc.).[76][77]

A common method of processing and extracting meaning from natural language is through semantic indexing. Although these indexes require a large volume of user input, it is expected that increases in processor speeds and decreases in data storage costs will result in greater efficiency.

Machine perception[83] is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, tactile sensors, sonar and others) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision[84] is the ability to analyze visual input. A few selected subproblems are speech recognition,[85] facial recognition and object recognition.[86]

The field of robotics[87] is closely related to AI. Intelligence is required for robots to handle tasks such as object manipulation[88] and navigation, with sub-problems such as localization, mapping, and motion planning. These systems require that an agent is able to: Be spatially cognizant of its surroundings, learn from and build a map of its environment, figure out how to get from one point in space to another, and execute that movement (which often involves compliant motion, a process where movement requires maintaining physical contact with an object).[90]

Affective computing is the study and development of systems that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science. While the origins of the field may be traced as far back as the early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard’s 1995 paper on “affective computing”.[97][98] A motivation for the research is the ability to simulate empathy, where the machine would be able to interpret human emotions and adapts its behavior to give an appropriate response to those emotions.

Emotion and social skills[99] are important to an intelligent agent for two reasons. First, being able to predict the actions of others by understanding their motives and emotional states allow an agent to make better decisions. Concepts such as game theory, decision theory, necessitate that an agent be able to detect and model human emotions. Second, in an effort to facilitate humancomputer interaction, an intelligent machine may want to display emotions (even if it does not experience those emotions itself) to appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction.

A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (the philosophical psychological perspective) and practically (the specific implementation of systems that generate novel and useful outputs).

Many researchers think that their work will eventually be incorporated into a machine with artificial general intelligence, combining all the skills mentioned above and even exceeding human ability in most or all these areas.[17][100] A few believe that anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial brain may be required for such a project.[101][102]

Many of the problems above also require that general intelligence be solved. For example, even specific straightforward tasks, like machine translation, require that a machine read and write in both languages (NLP), follow the author’s argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the author’s original intent (social intelligence). A problem like machine translation is considered “AI-complete”, but all of these problems need to be solved simultaneously in order to reach human-level machine performance.

There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree about many issues.[103] A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence by studying psychology or neurology? Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering?[14] Can intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems?[15] Can intelligence be reproduced using high-level symbols, similar to words and ideas? Or does it require “sub-symbolic” processing?[16] John Haugeland, who coined the term GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence), also proposed that AI should more properly be referred to as synthetic intelligence,[104] a term which has since been adopted by some non-GOFAI researchers.

Stuart Shapiro divides AI research into three approaches, which he calls computational psychology, computational philosophy, and computer science. Computational psychology is used to make computer programs that mimic human behavior.[107] Computational philosophy, is used to develop an adaptive, free-flowing computer mind.[107] Implementing computer science serves the goal of creating computers that can perform tasks that only people could previously accomplish.[107] Together, the humanesque behavior, mind, and actions make up artificial intelligence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of researchers explored the connection between neurology, information theory, and cybernetics. Some of them built machines that used electronic networks to exhibit rudimentary intelligence, such as W. Grey Walter’s turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. Many of these researchers gathered for meetings of the Teleological Society at Princeton University and the Ratio Club in England.[27] By 1960, this approach was largely abandoned, although elements of it would be revived in the 1980s.

When access to digital computers became possible in the middle 1950s, AI research began to explore the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was centered in three institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford and MIT, and each one developed its own style of research. John Haugeland named these approaches to AI “good old fashioned AI” or “GOFAI”.[108] During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level thinking in small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background.[109] Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the goal of their field.

Economist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s.[110][111]

Unlike Newell and Simon, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate human thought, but should instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem solving, regardless of whether people used the same algorithms.[14] His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning.[112] Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming.[113]

Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert)[114] found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad-hoc solutions they argued that there was no simple and general principle (like logic) that would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their “anti-logic” approaches as “scruffy” (as opposed to the “neat” paradigms at CMU and Stanford).[15] Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat’s Cyc) are an example of “scruffy” AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time.[115]

When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications.[116] This “knowledge revolution” led to the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the first truly successful form of AI software.[37] The knowledge revolution was also driven by the realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI applications.

By the 1980s progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers began to look into “sub-symbolic” approaches to specific AI problems.[16] Sub-symbolic methods manage to approach intelligence without specific representations of knowledge.

This includes embodied, situated, behavior-based, and nouvelle AI. Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.[117] Their work revived the non-symbolic viewpoint of the early cybernetics researchers of the 1950s and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body (such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.

Interest in neural networks and “connectionism” was revived by David Rumelhart and others in the middle of the 1980s.[118] Neural networks are an example of soft computing — they are solutions to problems which cannot be solved with complete logical certainty, and where an approximate solution is often sufficient. Other soft computing approaches to AI include fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation and many statistical tools. The application of soft computing to AI is studied collectively by the emerging discipline of computational intelligence.[119]

In the 1990s, AI researchers developed sophisticated mathematical tools to solve specific subproblems. These tools are truly scientific, in the sense that their results are both measurable and verifiable, and they have been responsible for many of AI’s recent successes. The shared mathematical language has also permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics or operations research). Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig describe this movement as nothing less than a “revolution” and “the victory of the neats”.[38] Critics argue that these techniques (with few exceptions) are too focused on particular problems and have failed to address the long-term goal of general intelligence. There is an ongoing debate about the relevance and validity of statistical approaches in AI, exemplified in part by exchanges between Peter Norvig and Noam Chomsky.

In the course of 60 or so years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below.

Many problems in AI can be solved in theory by intelligently searching through many possible solutions:[127] Reasoning can be reduced to performing a search. For example, logical proof can be viewed as searching for a path that leads from premises to conclusions, where each step is the application of an inference rule.[128] Planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis.[129] Robotics algorithms for moving limbs and grasping objects use local searches in configuration space.[88] Many learning algorithms use search algorithms based on optimization.

Simple exhaustive searches[130] are rarely sufficient for most real world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use “heuristics” or “rules of thumb” that prioritize choices in favor of those that are more likely to reach a goal, and to do so in a shorter number of steps. In some search methodologies heuristics can also serve to entirely eliminate some choices that are unlikely to lead to a goal (called “pruning the search tree”). Heuristics supply the program with a “best guess” for the path on which the solution lies.[131] Heuristics limit the search for solutions into a smaller sample size.

A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.[132]

Evolutionary computation uses a form of optimization search. For example, they may begin with a population of organisms (the guesses) and then allow them to mutate and recombine, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation (refining the guesses). Forms of evolutionary computation include swarm intelligence algorithms (such as ant colony or particle swarm optimization)[133] and evolutionary algorithms (such as genetic algorithms, gene expression programming, and genetic programming).[134]

Logic[135] is used for knowledge representation and problem solving, but it can be applied to other problems as well. For example, the satplan algorithm uses logic for planning[136] and inductive logic programming is a method for learning.[137]

Several different forms of logic are used in AI research. Propositional or sentential logic[138] is the logic of statements which can be true or false. First-order logic[139] also allows the use of quantifiers and predicates, and can express facts about objects, their properties, and their relations with each other. Fuzzy logic,[140] is a version of first-order logic which allows the truth of a statement to be represented as a value between 0 and 1, rather than simply True (1) or False (0). Fuzzy systems can be used for uncertain reasoning and have been widely used in modern industrial and consumer product control systems. Subjective logic[citation needed] models uncertainty in a different and more explicit manner than fuzzy-logic: a given binomial opinion satisfies belief + disbelief + uncertainty = 1 within a Beta distribution. By this method, ignorance can be distinguished from probabilistic statements that an agent makes with high confidence.

Default logics, non-monotonic logics and circumscription[62] are forms of logic designed to help with default reasoning and the qualification problem. Several extensions of logic have been designed to handle specific domains of knowledge, such as: description logics;[54] situation calculus, event calculus and fluent calculus (for representing events and time);[55] causal calculus;[56] belief calculus;[141] and modal logics.[57]

Many problems in AI (in reasoning, planning, learning, perception and robotics) require the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of powerful tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics.[142]

Bayesian networks[143] are a very general tool that can be used for a large number of problems: reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm),[144] learning (using the expectation-maximization algorithm),[145] planning (using decision networks)[146] and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks).[147] Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing and finding explanations for streams of data, helping perception systems to analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters).[147]

A key concept from the science of economics is “utility”: a measure of how valuable something is to an intelligent agent. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis,[148] and information value theory.[68] These tools include models such as Markov decision processes,[149] dynamic decision networks,[147] game theory and mechanism design.[150]

The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (“if shiny then diamond”) and controllers (“if shiny then pick up”). Controllers do, however, also classify conditions before inferring actions, and therefore classification forms a central part of many AI systems. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine a closest match. They can be tuned according to examples, making them very attractive for use in AI. These examples are known as observations or patterns. In supervised learning, each pattern belongs to a certain predefined class. A class can be seen as a decision that has to be made. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that observation is classified based on previous experience.[151]

A classifier can be trained in various ways; there are many statistical and machine learning approaches. The most widely used classifiers are the neural network,[152] kernel methods such as the support vector machine,[153] k-nearest neighbor algorithm,[154] Gaussian mixture model,[155] naive Bayes classifier,[156] and decision tree.[157] The performance of these classifiers have been compared over a wide range of tasks. Classifier performance depends greatly on the characteristics of the data to be classified. There is no single classifier that works best on all given problems; this is also referred to as the “no free lunch” theorem. Determining a suitable classifier for a given problem is still more an art than science.[158]

Neural networks are modeled after the neurons in the human brain, where a trained algorithm determines an output response for input signals.[159] The study of non-learning artificial neural networks[152] began in the decade before the field of AI research was founded, in the work of Walter Pitts and Warren McCullouch. Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron, a learning network with a single layer, similar to the old concept of linear regression. Early pioneers also include Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko, Teuvo Kohonen, Stephen Grossberg, Kunihiko Fukushima, Christoph von der Malsburg, David Willshaw, Shun-Ichi Amari, Bernard Widrow, John Hopfield, Eduardo R. Caianiello, and others.

The main categories of networks are acyclic or feedforward neural networks (where the signal passes in only one direction) and recurrent neural networks (which allow feedback and short-term memories of previous input events). Among the most popular feedforward networks are perceptrons, multi-layer perceptrons and radial basis networks.[160] Neural networks can be applied to the problem of intelligent control (for robotics) or learning, using such techniques as Hebbian learning, GMDH or competitive learning.[161]

Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm, which had been around since 1970 as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa,[162][163] and was introduced to neural networks by Paul Werbos.[164][165][166]

Hierarchical temporal memory is an approach that models some of the structural and algorithmic properties of the neocortex.[167]

In short, most neural networks use some form of gradient descent on a hand-created neural topology. However, some research groups, such as Uber, argue that simple neuroevolution to mutate new neural network topologies and weights may be competitive with sophisticated gradient descent approaches. One advantage of neuroevolution is that it may be less prone to get caught in “dead ends”.[168]

Deep learning is any artificial neural network that can learn a long chain of causal links. For example, a feedforward network with six hidden layers can learn a seven-link causal chain (six hidden layers + output layer) and has a “credit assignment path” (CAP) depth of seven. Many deep learning systems need to be able to learn chains ten or more causal links in length.[169] Deep learning has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and others.[170][171][169]

According to one overview,[172] the expression “Deep Learning” was introduced to the Machine Learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986[173] and gained traction after Igor Aizenberg and colleagues introduced it to Artificial Neural Networks in 2000.[174] The first functional Deep Learning networks were published by Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and V. G. Lapa in 1965.[175][pageneeded] These networks are trained one layer at a time. Ivakhnenko’s 1971 paper[176] describes the learning of a deep feedforward multilayer perceptron with eight layers, already much deeper than many later networks. In 2006, a publication by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov introduced another way of pre-training many-layered feedforward neural networks (FNNs) one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then using supervised backpropagation for fine-tuning. Similar to shallow artificial neural networks, deep neural networks can model complex non-linear relationships. Over the last few years, advances in both machine learning algorithms and computer hardware have led to more efficient methods for training deep neural networks that contain many layers of non-linear hidden units and a very large output layer.[178]

Deep learning often uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs), whose origins can be traced back to the Neocognitron introduced by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980.[179] In 1989, Yann LeCun and colleagues applied backpropagation to such an architecture. In the early 2000s, in an industrial application CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US.[180] Since 2011, fast implementations of CNNs on GPUs have won many visual pattern recognition competitions.[169]

CNNs with 12 convolutional layers were used in conjunction with reinforcement learning by Deepmind’s “AlphaGo Lee”, the program that beat a top Go champion in 2016.[181]

Early on, deep learning was also applied to sequence learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs)[182] which are in theory Turing complete[183] and can run arbitrary programs to process arbitrary sequences of inputs. The depth of an RNN is unlimited and depends on the length of its input sequence; thus, an RNN is an example of deep learning.[169] RNNs can be trained by gradient descent[184][185][186] but suffer from the vanishing gradient problem.[170][187] In 1992, it was shown that unsupervised pre-training of a stack of recurrent neural networks can speed up subsequent supervised learning of deep sequential problems.[188]

Numerous researchers now use variants of a deep learning recurrent NN called the long short-term memory (LSTM) network published by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber in 1997.[189] LSTM is often trained by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC).[190] At Google, Microsoft and Baidu this approach has revolutionised speech recognition.[191][192][193] For example, in 2015, Google’s speech recognition experienced a dramatic performance jump of 49% through CTC-trained LSTM, which is now available through Google Voice to billions of smartphone users.[194] Google also used LSTM to improve machine translation,[195] Language Modeling[196] and Multilingual Language Processing.[197] LSTM combined with CNNs also improved automatic image captioning[198] and a plethora of other applications.

Control theory, the grandchild of cybernetics, has many important applications, especially in robotics.[199]

AI researchers have developed several specialized languages for AI research, including Lisp,[200] Prolog,[201] Python,[citation needed] and C++.[202]

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a general procedure to test the intelligence of an agent now known as the Turing test. This procedure allows almost all the major problems of artificial intelligence to be tested. However, it is a very difficult challenge and at present all agents fail.[203]

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.[citation needed]

For example, performance at draughts (i.e. checkers) is optimal,[citation needed] performance at chess is high-human and nearing super-human (see computer chess:computers versus human) and performance at many everyday tasks (such as recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into something) is sub-human.

A quite different approach measures machine intelligence through tests which are developed from mathematical definitions of intelligence. Examples of these kinds of tests start in the late nineties devising intelligence tests using notions from Kolmogorov complexity and data compression.[204] Two major advantages of mathematical definitions are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

A derivative of the Turing test is the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). As the name implies, this helps to determine that a user is an actual person and not a computer posing as a human. In contrast to the standard Turing test, CAPTCHA is administered by a machine and targeted to a human as opposed to being administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A computer asks a user to complete a simple test then generates a grade for that test. Computers are unable to solve the problem, so correct solutions are deemed to be the result of a person taking the test. A common type of CAPTCHA is the test that requires the typing of distorted letters, numbers or symbols that appear in an image undecipherable by a computer.

AI is relevant to any intellectual task. Modern artificial intelligence techniques are pervasive and are too numerous to list here. Frequently, when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence; this phenomenon is described as the AI effect.

With social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people and news organisations increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating distribution,[211] major publishers now use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to post stories more effectively and generate higher volumes of traffic.[212]

There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence. The main areas promoted are: general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, robotic cars, robot soccer and games.

Artificial intelligence is breaking into the healthcare industry by assisting doctors. According to Bloomberg Technology, Microsoft has developed AI to help doctors find the right treatments for cancer.[213] There is a great amount of research and drugs developed relating to cancer. In detail, there are more than 800 medicines and vaccines to treat cancer. This negatively affects the doctors, because there are too many options to choose from, making it more difficult to choose the right drugs for the patients. Microsoft is working on a project to develop a machine called “Hanover”. Its goal is to memorize all the papers necessary to cancer and help predict which combinations of drugs will be most effective for each patient. One project that is being worked on at the moment is fighting myeloid leukemia, a fatal cancer where the treatment has not improved in decades. Another study was reported to have found that artificial intelligence was as good as trained doctors in identifying skin cancers.[214] Another study is using artificial intelligence to try and monitor multiple high-risk patients, and this is done by asking each patient numerous questions based on data acquired from live doctor to patient interactions.[215]

According to CNN, there was a recent study by surgeons at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington which successfully demonstrated surgery with an autonomous robot. The team supervised the robot while it performed soft-tissue surgery, stitching together a pig’s bowel during open surgery, and doing so better than a human surgeon, the team claimed.[216] IBM has created its own artificial intelligence computer, the IBM Watson, which has beaten human intelligence (at some levels). Watson not only won at the game show Jeopardy! against former champions,[217] but, was declared a hero after successfully diagnosing a women who was suffering from leukemia.[218]

Advancements in AI have contributed to the growth of the automotive industry through the creation and evolution of self-driving vehicles. As of 2016, there are over 30 companies utilizing AI into the creation of driverless cars. A few companies involved with AI include Tesla, Google, and Apple.[219]

Many components contribute to the functioning of self-driving cars. These vehicles incorporate systems such as braking, lane changing, collision prevention, navigation and mapping. Together, these systems, as well as high performance computers, are integrated into one complex vehicle.[220]

Recent developments in autonomous automobiles have made the innovation of self-driving trucks possible, though they are still in the testing phase. The UK government has passed legislation to begin testing of self-driving truck platoons in 2018.[221] Self-driving truck platoons are a fleet of self-driving trucks following the lead of one non-self-driving truck, so the truck platoons aren’t entirely autonomous yet. Meanwhile, the Daimler, a German automobile corporation, is testing the Freightliner Inspiration which is a semi-autonomous truck that will only be used on the highway.[222]

One main factor that influences the ability for a driver-less automobile to function is mapping. In general, the vehicle would be pre-programmed with a map of the area being driven. This map would include data on the approximations of street light and curb heights in order for the vehicle to be aware of its surroundings. However, Google has been working on an algorithm with the purpose of eliminating the need for pre-programmed maps and instead, creating a device that would be able to adjust to a variety of new surroundings.[223] Some self-driving cars are not equipped with steering wheels or brake pedals, so there has also been research focused on creating an algorithm that is capable of maintaining a safe environment for the passengers in the vehicle through awareness of speed and driving conditions.[224]

Another factor that is influencing the ability for a driver-less automobile is the safety of the passenger. To make a driver-less automobile, engineers must program it to handle high risk situations. These situations could include a head on collision with pedestrians. The car’s main goal should be to make a decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrians and saving the passengers in the car. But there is a possibility the car would need to make a decision that would put someone in danger. In other words, the car would need to decide to save the pedestrians or the passengers.[225]The programing of the car in these situations is crucial to a successful driver-less automobile.

Financial institutions have long used artificial neural network systems to detect charges or claims outside of the norm, flagging these for human investigation. The use of AI in banking can be traced back to 1987 when Security Pacific National Bank in USA set-up a Fraud Prevention Task force to counter the unauthorised use of debit cards. Programs like Kasisto and Moneystream are using AI in financial services.

Banks use artificial intelligence systems today to organize operations, maintain book-keeping, invest in stocks, and manage properties. AI can react to changes overnight or when business is not taking place.[226] In August 2001, robots beat humans in a simulated financial trading competition.[227] AI has also reduced fraud and financial crimes by monitoring behavioral patterns of users for any abnormal changes or anomalies.[228]

The use of AI machines in the market in applications such as online trading and decision making has changed major economic theories.[229] For example, AI based buying and selling platforms have changed the law of supply and demand in that it is now possible to easily estimate individualized demand and supply curves and thus individualized pricing. Furthermore, AI machines reduce information asymmetry in the market and thus making markets more efficient while reducing the volume of trades. Furthermore, AI in the markets limits the consequences of behavior in the markets again making markets more efficient. Other theories where AI has had impact include in rational choice, rational expectations, game theory, Lewis turning point, portfolio optimization and counterfactual thinking.

In video games, artificial intelligence is routinely used to generate dynamic purposeful behavior in non-player characters (NPCs). In addition, well-understood AI techniques are routinely used for pathfinding. Some researchers consider NPC AI in games to be a “solved problem” for most production tasks. Games with more atypical AI include the AI director of Left 4 Dead (2008) and the neuroevolutionary training of platoons in Supreme Commander 2 (2010).[230][231]

A platform (or “computing platform”) is defined as “some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run”. As Rodney Brooks pointed out many years ago, it is not just the artificial intelligence software that defines the AI features of the platform, but rather the actual platform itself that affects the AI that results, i.e., there needs to be work in AI problems on real-world platforms rather than in isolation.

A wide variety of platforms has allowed different aspects of AI to develop, ranging from expert systems such as Cyc to deep-learning frameworks to robot platforms such as the Roomba with open interface.[233] Recent advances in deep artificial neural networks and distributed computing have led to a proliferation of software libraries, including Deeplearning4j, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.

Collective AI is a platform architecture that combines individual AI into a collective entity, in order to achieve global results from individual behaviors.[234][235] With its collective structure, developers can crowdsource information and extend the functionality of existing AI domains on the platform for their own use, as well as continue to create and share new domains and capabilities for the wider community and greater good.[236] As developers continue to contribute, the overall platform grows more intelligent and is able to perform more requests, providing a scalable model for greater communal benefit.[235] Organizations like SoundHound Inc. and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have used this collaborative AI model.[237][235]

A McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of 1.5 million highly trained data and AI professionals and managers[238] and a number of private bootcamps have developed programs to meet that demand, including free programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs like General Assembly.[239]

Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have established a non-profit partnership to formulate best practices on artificial intelligence technologies, advance the public’s understanding, and to serve as a platform about artificial intelligence.[240] They stated: “This partnership on AI will conduct research, organize discussions, provide thought leadership, consult with relevant third parties, respond to questions from the public and media, and create educational material that advance the understanding of AI technologies including machine perception, learning, and automated reasoning.”[240] Apple joined other tech companies as a founding member of the Partnership on AI in January 2017. The corporate members will make financial and research contributions to the group, while engaging with the scientific community to bring academics onto the board.[241][235]

At Microsoft, researchers in artificial intelligence are harnessing the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines that extend the human ability to sense, learn and understand. The research infuses computers, materials and systems with the ability to reason, communicate and perform with humanlike skill and agility.

Microsofts deep investments in the field are advancing the state of the art in machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers that understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions and interact with their environment. In addition, the companys researchers are thought leaders on the ethics and societal impacts of intelligent technologies. The research, tools and services that result from this investment are woven into existing and new products and, at the same time, made open and accessible to the broader community in a bid to accelerate innovation, democratize AI and solve the worlds most pressing challenges.

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline:Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. And as many havelost count of how many similar articles theyveseen.Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because theyve become conscious and/or evil.On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers dontworry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, androbots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, its irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AIdoes, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isnt malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans dont generally hate ants, but were more intelligent than they are so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and theres an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines cant have goals.Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target.If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose.If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldnt exclaim: Im not worried, because machines cant have goals!

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids,because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isnt with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines cant control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, its possible that we might also cede control.

At Microsoft, researchers in artificial intelligence are harnessing the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines that extend the human ability to sense, learn and understand. The research infuses computers, materials and systems with the ability to reason, communicate and perform with humanlike skill and agility.

Microsofts deep investments in the field are advancing the state of the art in machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers that understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions and interact with their environment. In addition, the companys researchers are thought leaders on the ethics and societal impacts of intelligent technologies. The research, tools and services that result from this investment are woven into existing and new products and, at the same time, made open and accessible to the broader community in a bid to accelerate innovation, democratize AI and solve the worlds most pressing challenges.

At Microsoft, researchers in artificial intelligence are harnessing the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines that extend the human ability to sense, learn and understand. The research infuses computers, materials and systems with the ability to reason, communicate and perform with humanlike skill and agility.

Microsofts deep investments in the field are advancing the state of the art in machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers that understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions and interact with their environment. In addition, the companys researchers are thought leaders on the ethics and societal impacts of intelligent technologies. The research, tools and services that result from this investment are woven into existing and new products and, at the same time, made open and accessible to the broader community in a bid to accelerate innovation, democratize AI and solve the worlds most pressing challenges.

Artificial intelligence (AI, also machine intelligence, MI) is intelligence displayed by machines, in contrast with the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of “intelligent agents”: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal.[1] Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. See glossary of artificial intelligence.

The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring “intelligence” are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”[3] For instance, optical character recognition is frequently excluded from “artificial intelligence”, having become a routine technology.[4] Capabilities generally classified as AI as of 2017[update] include successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go[6]), autonomous cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, and interpreting complex data, including images and videos.

Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956, and in the years since has experienced several waves of optimism,[7][8] followed by disappointment and the loss of funding (known as an “AI winter”),[9][10] followed by new approaches, success and renewed funding.[8][11] For most of its history, AI research has been divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other.[12] These sub-fields are based on technical considerations, such as particular goals (e.g. “robotics” or “machine learning”),[13] the use of particular tools (“logic” or “neural networks”), or deep philosophical differences.[14][15][16] Subfields have also been based on social factors (particular institutions or the work of particular researchers).[12]

The traditional problems (or goals) of AI research include reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, explainability and the ability to move and manipulate objects.[13] General intelligence is among the field’s long-term goals.[17] Approaches include statistical methods, computational intelligence, and traditional symbolic AI. Many tools are used in AI, including versions of search and mathematical optimization, neural networks and methods based on statistics, probability and economics. The AI field draws upon computer science, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial psychology and many others.

The field was founded on the claim that human intelligence “can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”.[18] This raises philosophical arguments about the nature of the mind and the ethics of creating artificial beings endowed with human-like intelligence, issues which have been explored by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.[19] Some people also consider AI a danger to humanity if it progresses unabatedly.[20] Others believe that AI, unlike previous technological revolutions, will create a risk of mass unemployment.[21]

In the twenty-first century, AI techniques have experienced a resurgence following concurrent advances in computer power, large amounts of data, and theoretical understanding; and AI techniques have become an essential part of the technology industry, helping to solve many challenging problems in computer science.[22][11]

While thought-capable artificial beings appeared as storytelling devices in antiquity,[23] the idea of actually trying to build a machine to perform useful reasoning may have begun with Ramon Llull (c. 1300 CE). With his Calculus ratiocinator, Gottfried Leibniz extended the concept of the calculating machine (Wilhelm Schickard engineered the first one around 1623), intending to perform operations on concepts rather than numbers. Since the 19th century, artificial beings are common in fiction, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Karel apek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).[25]

The study of mechanical or “formal” reasoning began with philosophers and mathematicians in antiquity. The study of mathematical logic led directly to Alan Turing’s theory of computation, which suggested that a machine, by shuffling symbols as simple as “0” and “1”, could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction. This insight, that digital computers can simulate any process of formal reasoning, is known as the ChurchTuring thesis.[26][pageneeded] Along with concurrent discoveries in neurology, information theory and cybernetics, this led researchers to consider the possibility of building an electronic brain.[27] The first work that is now generally recognized as AI was McCullouch and Pitts’ 1943 formal design for Turing-complete “artificial neurons”.

The field of AI research was born at a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.[28] Attendees Allen Newell (CMU), Herbert Simon (CMU), John McCarthy (MIT), Marvin Minsky (MIT) and Arthur Samuel (IBM) became the founders and leaders of AI research.[29] They and their students produced programs that the press described as “astonishing”: computers were learning checkers strategies (c. 1954)[31] (and by 1959 were reportedly playing better than the average human),[32] solving word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems (Logic Theorist, first run c. 1956) and speaking English.[33] By the middle of the 1960s, research in the U.S. was heavily funded by the Department of Defense[34] and laboratories had been established around the world.[35] AI’s founders were optimistic about the future: Herbert Simon predicted, “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do”. Marvin Minsky agreed, writing, “within a generation… the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”.[7]

They failed to recognize the difficulty of some of the remaining tasks. Progress slowed and in 1974, in response to the criticism of Sir James Lighthill and ongoing pressure from the US Congress to fund more productive projects, both the U.S. and British governments cut off exploratory research in AI. The next few years would later be called an “AI winter”,[9] a period when obtaining funding for AI projects was difficult.

In the early 1980s, AI research was revived by the commercial success of expert systems,[37] a form of AI program that simulated the knowledge and analytical skills of human experts. By 1985 the market for AI had reached over a billion dollars. At the same time, Japan’s fifth generation computer project inspired the U.S and British governments to restore funding for academic research.[8] However, beginning with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 1987, AI once again fell into disrepute, and a second, longer-lasting hiatus began.[10]

In the late 1990s and early 21st century, AI began to be used for logistics, data mining, medical diagnosis and other areas.[22] The success was due to increasing computational power (see Moore’s law), greater emphasis on solving specific problems, new ties between AI and other fields and a commitment by researchers to mathematical methods and scientific standards.[38] Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov on 11 May 1997.

Advanced statistical techniques (loosely known as deep learning), access to large amounts of data and faster computers enabled advances in machine learning and perception.[citation needed] By the mid 2010s, machine learning applications were used throughout the world.[citation needed] In a Jeopardy! quiz show exhibition match, IBM’s question answering system, Watson, defeated the two greatest Jeopardy champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, by a significant margin. The Kinect, which provides a 3D bodymotion interface for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One use algorithms that emerged from lengthy AI research[41] as do intelligent personal assistants in smartphones.[42] In March 2016, AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 games of Go in a match with Go champion Lee Sedol, becoming the first computer Go-playing system to beat a professional Go player without handicaps.[6][43] In the 2017 Future of Go Summit, AlphaGo won a three-game match with Ke Jie,[44] who at the time continuously held the world No. 1 ranking for two years.[45][46] This marked the completion of a significant milestone in the development of Artificial Intelligence as Go is an extremely complex game, more so than Chess.

According to Bloomberg’s Jack Clark, 2015 was a landmark year for artificial intelligence, with the number of software projects that use AI within Google increased from a “sporadic usage” in 2012 to more than 2,700 projects. Clark also presents factual data indicating that error rates in image processing tasks have fallen significantly since 2011.[47] He attributes this to an increase in affordable neural networks, due to a rise in cloud computing infrastructure and to an increase in research tools and datasets.[11] Other cited examples include Microsoft’s development of a Skype system that can automatically translate from one language to another and Facebook’s system that can describe images to blind people.[47]

The overall research goal of artificial intelligence is to create technology that allows computers and machines to function in an intelligent manner. The general problem of simulating (or creating) intelligence has been broken down into sub-problems. These consist of particular traits or capabilities that researchers expect an intelligent system to display. The traits described below have received the most attention.[13]

Early researchers developed algorithms that imitated step-by-step reasoning that humans use when they solve puzzles or make logical deductions.[48] By the late 1980s and 1990s, AI research had developed methods for dealing with uncertain or incomplete information, employing concepts from probability and economics.[49]

For difficult problems, algorithms can require enormous computational resourcesmost experience a “combinatorial explosion”: the amount of memory or computer time required becomes astronomical for problems of a certain size. The search for more efficient problem-solving algorithms is a high priority.[50]

Human beings ordinarily use fast, intuitive judgments rather than step-by-step deduction that early AI research was able to model.[51] AI has progressed using “sub-symbolic” problem solving: embodied agent approaches emphasize the importance of sensorimotor skills to higher reasoning; neural net research attempts to simulate the structures inside the brain that give rise to this skill; statistical approaches to AI mimic the human ability to guess.

Knowledge representation[52] and knowledge engineering[53] are central to AI research. Many of the problems machines are expected to solve will require extensive knowledge about the world. Among the things that AI needs to represent are: objects, properties, categories and relations between objects;[54] situations, events, states and time;[55] causes and effects;[56] knowledge about knowledge (what we know about what other people know);[57] and many other, less well researched domains. A representation of “what exists” is an ontology: the set of objects, relations, concepts, and properties formally described so that software agents can interpret them. The semantics of these are captured as description logic concepts, roles, and individuals, and typically implemented as classes, properties, and individuals in the Web Ontology Language.[58] The most general ontologies are called upper ontologies, which attempt to provide a foundation for all other knowledge[59] by acting as mediators between domain ontologies that cover specific knowledge about a particular knowledge domain (field of interest or area of concern). Such formal knowledge representations are suitable for content-based indexing and retrieval, scene interpretation, clinical decision support, knowledge discovery via automated reasoning (inferring new statements based on explicitly stated knowledge), etc. Video events are often represented as SWRL rules, which can be used, among others, to automatically generate subtitles for constrained videos.[60]

Among the most difficult problems in knowledge representation are:

Intelligent agents must be able to set goals and achieve them.[67] They need a way to visualize the futurea representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change itand be able to make choices that maximize the utility (or “value”) of available choices.[68]

In classical planning problems, the agent can assume that it is the only system acting in the world, allowing the agent to be certain of the consequences of its actions.[69] However, if the agent is not the only actor, then it requires that the agent can reason under uncertainty. This calls for an agent that can not only assess its environment and make predictions, but also evaluate its predictions and adapt based on its assessment.[70]

Multi-agent planning uses the cooperation and competition of many agents to achieve a given goal. Emergent behavior such as this is used by evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence.[71]

Machine learning, a fundamental concept of AI research since the field’s inception,[72] is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience.[73][74]

Unsupervised learning is the ability to find patterns in a stream of input. Supervised learning includes both classification and numerical regression. Classification is used to determine what category something belongs in, after seeing a number of examples of things from several categories. Regression is the attempt to produce a function that describes the relationship between inputs and outputs and predicts how the outputs should change as the inputs change. In reinforcement learning[75] the agent is rewarded for good responses and punished for bad ones. The agent uses this sequence of rewards and punishments to form a strategy for operating in its problem space. These three types of learning can be analyzed in terms of decision theory, using concepts like utility. The mathematical analysis of machine learning algorithms and their performance is a branch of theoretical computer science known as computational learning theory.[citation needed]

Within developmental robotics, developmental learning approaches are elaborated upon to allow robots to accumulate repertoires of novel skills through autonomous self-exploration, social interaction with human teachers, and the use of guidance mechanisms (active learning, maturation, motor synergies, etc.).[76][77]

A common method of processing and extracting meaning from natural language is through semantic indexing. Although these indexes require a large volume of user input, it is expected that increases in processor speeds and decreases in data storage costs will result in greater efficiency.

Machine perception[83] is the ability to use input from sensors (such as cameras, microphones, tactile sensors, sonar and others) to deduce aspects of the world. Computer vision[84] is the ability to analyze visual input. A few selected subproblems are speech recognition,[85] facial recognition and object recognition.[86]

The field of robotics[87] is closely related to AI. Intelligence is required for robots to handle tasks such as object manipulation[88] and navigation, with sub-problems such as localization, mapping, and motion planning. These systems require that an agent is able to: Be spatially cognizant of its surroundings, learn from and build a map of its environment, figure out how to get from one point in space to another, and execute that movement (which often involves compliant motion, a process where movement requires maintaining physical contact with an object).[90]

Affective computing is the study and development of systems that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science. While the origins of the field may be traced as far back as the early philosophical inquiries into emotion, the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard’s 1995 paper on “affective computing”.[97][98] A motivation for the research is the ability to simulate empathy, where the machine would be able to interpret human emotions and adapts its behavior to give an appropriate response to those emotions.

Emotion and social skills[99] are important to an intelligent agent for two reasons. First, being able to predict the actions of others by understanding their motives and emotional states allow an agent to make better decisions. Concepts such as game theory, decision theory, necessitate that an agent be able to detect and model human emotions. Second, in an effort to facilitate humancomputer interaction, an intelligent machine may want to display emotions (even if it does not experience those emotions itself) to appear more sensitive to the emotional dynamics of human interaction.

A sub-field of AI addresses creativity both theoretically (the philosophical psychological perspective) and practically (the specific implementation of systems that generate novel and useful outputs).

Many researchers think that their work will eventually be incorporated into a machine with artificial general intelligence, combining all the skills mentioned above and even exceeding human ability in most or all these areas.[17][100] A few believe that anthropomorphic features like artificial consciousness or an artificial brain may be required for such a project.[101][102]

Many of the problems above also require that general intelligence be solved. For example, even specific straightforward tasks, like machine translation, require that a machine read and write in both languages (NLP), follow the author’s argument (reason), know what is being talked about (knowledge), and faithfully reproduce the author’s original intent (social intelligence). A problem like machine translation is considered “AI-complete”, but all of these problems need to be solved simultaneously in order to reach human-level machine performance.

There is no established unifying theory or paradigm that guides AI research. Researchers disagree about many issues.[103] A few of the most long standing questions that have remained unanswered are these: should artificial intelligence simulate natural intelligence by studying psychology or neurology? Or is human biology as irrelevant to AI research as bird biology is to aeronautical engineering?[14] Can intelligent behavior be described using simple, elegant principles (such as logic or optimization)? Or does it necessarily require solving a large number of completely unrelated problems?[15] Can intelligence be reproduced using high-level symbols, similar to words and ideas? Or does it require “sub-symbolic” processing?[16] John Haugeland, who coined the term GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence), also proposed that AI should more properly be referred to as synthetic intelligence,[104] a term which has since been adopted by some non-GOFAI researchers.

Stuart Shapiro divides AI research into three approaches, which he calls computational psychology, computational philosophy, and computer science. Computational psychology is used to make computer programs that mimic human behavior.[107] Computational philosophy, is used to develop an adaptive, free-flowing computer mind.[107] Implementing computer science serves the goal of creating computers that can perform tasks that only people could previously accomplish.[107] Together, the humanesque behavior, mind, and actions make up artificial intelligence.

In the 1940s and 1950s, a number of researchers explored the connection between neurology, information theory, and cybernetics. Some of them built machines that used electronic networks to exhibit rudimentary intelligence, such as W. Grey Walter’s turtles and the Johns Hopkins Beast. Many of these researchers gathered for meetings of the Teleological Society at Princeton University and the Ratio Club in England.[27] By 1960, this approach was largely abandoned, although elements of it would be revived in the 1980s.

When access to digital computers became possible in the middle 1950s, AI research began to explore the possibility that human intelligence could be reduced to symbol manipulation. The research was centered in three institutions: Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford and MIT, and each one developed its own style of research. John Haugeland named these approaches to AI “good old fashioned AI” or “GOFAI”.[108] During the 1960s, symbolic approaches had achieved great success at simulating high-level thinking in small demonstration programs. Approaches based on cybernetics or neural networks were abandoned or pushed into the background.[109] Researchers in the 1960s and the 1970s were convinced that symbolic approaches would eventually succeed in creating a machine with artificial general intelligence and considered this the goal of their field.

Economist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell studied human problem-solving skills and attempted to formalize them, and their work laid the foundations of the field of artificial intelligence, as well as cognitive science, operations research and management science. Their research team used the results of psychological experiments to develop programs that simulated the techniques that people used to solve problems. This tradition, centered at Carnegie Mellon University would eventually culminate in the development of the Soar architecture in the middle 1980s.[110][111]

Unlike Newell and Simon, John McCarthy felt that machines did not need to simulate human thought, but should instead try to find the essence of abstract reasoning and problem solving, regardless of whether people used the same algorithms.[14] His laboratory at Stanford (SAIL) focused on using formal logic to solve a wide variety of problems, including knowledge representation, planning and learning.[112] Logic was also the focus of the work at the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere in Europe which led to the development of the programming language Prolog and the science of logic programming.[113]

Researchers at MIT (such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert)[114] found that solving difficult problems in vision and natural language processing required ad-hoc solutions they argued that there was no simple and general principle (like logic) that would capture all the aspects of intelligent behavior. Roger Schank described their “anti-logic” approaches as “scruffy” (as opposed to the “neat” paradigms at CMU and Stanford).[15] Commonsense knowledge bases (such as Doug Lenat’s Cyc) are an example of “scruffy” AI, since they must be built by hand, one complicated concept at a time.[115]

When computers with large memories became available around 1970, researchers from all three traditions began to build knowledge into AI applications.[116] This “knowledge revolution” led to the development and deployment of expert systems (introduced by Edward Feigenbaum), the first truly successful form of AI software.[37] The knowledge revolution was also driven by the realization that enormous amounts of knowledge would be required by many simple AI applications.

By the 1980s progress in symbolic AI seemed to stall and many believed that symbolic systems would never be able to imitate all the processes of human cognition, especially perception, robotics, learning and pattern recognition. A number of researchers began to look into “sub-symbolic” approaches to specific AI problems.[16] Sub-symbolic methods manage to approach intelligence without specific representations of knowledge.

This includes embodied, situated, behavior-based, and nouvelle AI. Researchers from the related field of robotics, such as Rodney Brooks, rejected symbolic AI and focused on the basic engineering problems that would allow robots to move and survive.[117] Their work revived the non-symbolic viewpoint of the early cybernetics researchers of the 1950s and reintroduced the use of control theory in AI. This coincided with the development of the embodied mind thesis in the related field of cognitive science: the idea that aspects of the body (such as movement, perception and visualization) are required for higher intelligence.

Interest in neural networks and “connectionism” was revived by David Rumelhart and others in the middle of the 1980s.[118] Neural networks are an example of soft computing — they are solutions to problems which cannot be solved with complete logical certainty, and where an approximate solution is often sufficient. Other soft computing approaches to AI include fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation and many statistical tools. The application of soft computing to AI is studied collectively by the emerging discipline of computational intelligence.[119]

In the 1990s, AI researchers developed sophisticated mathematical tools to solve specific subproblems. These tools are truly scientific, in the sense that their results are both measurable and verifiable, and they have been responsible for many of AI’s recent successes. The shared mathematical language has also permitted a high level of collaboration with more established fields (like mathematics, economics or operations research). Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig describe this movement as nothing less than a “revolution” and “the victory of the neats”.[38] Critics argue that these techniques (with few exceptions) are too focused on particular problems and have failed to address the long-term goal of general intelligence. There is an ongoing debate about the relevance and validity of statistical approaches in AI, exemplified in part by exchanges between Peter Norvig and Noam Chomsky.

In the course of 60 or so years of research, AI has developed a large number of tools to solve the most difficult problems in computer science. A few of the most general of these methods are discussed below.

Many problems in AI can be solved in theory by intelligently searching through many possible solutions:[127] Reasoning can be reduced to performing a search. For example, logical proof can be viewed as searching for a path that leads from premises to conclusions, where each step is the application of an inference rule.[128] Planning algorithms search through trees of goals and subgoals, attempting to find a path to a target goal, a process called means-ends analysis.[129] Robotics algorithms for moving limbs and grasping objects use local searches in configuration space.[88] Many learning algorithms use search algorithms based on optimization.

Simple exhaustive searches[130] are rarely sufficient for most real world problems: the search space (the number of places to search) quickly grows to astronomical numbers. The result is a search that is too slow or never completes. The solution, for many problems, is to use “heuristics” or “rules of thumb” that prioritize choices in favor of those that are more likely to reach a goal, and to do so in a shorter number of steps. In some search methodologies heuristics can also serve to entirely eliminate some choices that are unlikely to lead to a goal (called “pruning the search tree”). Heuristics supply the program with a “best guess” for the path on which the solution lies.[131] Heuristics limit the search for solutions into a smaller sample size.

A very different kind of search came to prominence in the 1990s, based on the mathematical theory of optimization. For many problems, it is possible to begin the search with some form of a guess and then refine the guess incrementally until no more refinements can be made. These algorithms can be visualized as blind hill climbing: we begin the search at a random point on the landscape, and then, by jumps or steps, we keep moving our guess uphill, until we reach the top. Other optimization algorithms are simulated annealing, beam search and random optimization.[132]

Evolutionary computation uses a form of optimization search. For example, they may begin with a population of organisms (the guesses) and then allow them to mutate and recombine, selecting only the fittest to survive each generation (refining the guesses). Forms of evolutionary computation include swarm intelligence algorithms (such as ant colony or particle swarm optimization)[133] and evolutionary algorithms (such as genetic algorithms, gene expression programming, and genetic programming).[134]

Logic[135] is used for knowledge representation and problem solving, but it can be applied to other problems as well. For example, the satplan algorithm uses logic for planning[136] and inductive logic programming is a method for learning.[137]

Several different forms of logic are used in AI research. Propositional or sentential logic[138] is the logic of statements which can be true or false. First-order logic[139] also allows the use of quantifiers and predicates, and can express facts about objects, their properties, and their relations with each other. Fuzzy logic,[140] is a version of first-order logic which allows the truth of a statement to be represented as a value between 0 and 1, rather than simply True (1) or False (0). Fuzzy systems can be used for uncertain reasoning and have been widely used in modern industrial and consumer product control systems. Subjective logic[citation needed] models uncertainty in a different and more explicit manner than fuzzy-logic: a given binomial opinion satisfies belief + disbelief + uncertainty = 1 within a Beta distribution. By this method, ignorance can be distinguished from probabilistic statements that an agent makes with high confidence.

Default logics, non-monotonic logics and circumscription[62] are forms of logic designed to help with default reasoning and the qualification problem. Several extensions of logic have been designed to handle specific domains of knowledge, such as: description logics;[54] situation calculus, event calculus and fluent calculus (for representing events and time);[55] causal calculus;[56] belief calculus;[141] and modal logics.[57]

Many problems in AI (in reasoning, planning, learning, perception and robotics) require the agent to operate with incomplete or uncertain information. AI researchers have devised a number of powerful tools to solve these problems using methods from probability theory and economics.[142]

Bayesian networks[143] are a very general tool that can be used for a large number of problems: reasoning (using the Bayesian inference algorithm),[144] learning (using the expectation-maximization algorithm),[145] planning (using decision networks)[146] and perception (using dynamic Bayesian networks).[147] Probabilistic algorithms can also be used for filtering, prediction, smoothing and finding explanations for streams of data, helping perception systems to analyze processes that occur over time (e.g., hidden Markov models or Kalman filters).[147]

A key concept from the science of economics is “utility”: a measure of how valuable something is to an intelligent agent. Precise mathematical tools have been developed that analyze how an agent can make choices and plan, using decision theory, decision analysis,[148] and information value theory.[68] These tools include models such as Markov decision processes,[149] dynamic decision networks,[147] game theory and mechanism design.[150]

The simplest AI applications can be divided into two types: classifiers (“if shiny then diamond”) and controllers (“if shiny then pick up”). Controllers do, however, also classify conditions before inferring actions, and therefore classification forms a central part of many AI systems. Classifiers are functions that use pattern matching to determine a closest match. They can be tuned according to examples, making them very attractive for use in AI. These examples are known as observations or patterns. In supervised learning, each pattern belongs to a certain predefined class. A class can be seen as a decision that has to be made. All the observations combined with their class labels are known as a data set. When a new observation is received, that observation is classified based on previous experience.[151]

A classifier can be trained in various ways; there are many statistical and machine learning approaches. The most widely used classifiers are the neural network,[152] kernel methods such as the support vector machine,[153] k-nearest neighbor algorithm,[154] Gaussian mixture model,[155] naive Bayes classifier,[156] and decision tree.[157] The performance of these classifiers have been compared over a wide range of tasks. Classifier performance depends greatly on the characteristics of the data to be classified. There is no single classifier that works best on all given problems; this is also referred to as the “no free lunch” theorem. Determining a suitable classifier for a given problem is still more an art than science.[158]

Neural networks are modeled after the neurons in the human brain, where a trained algorithm determines an output response for input signals.[159] The study of non-learning artificial neural networks[152] began in the decade before the field of AI research was founded, in the work of Walter Pitts and Warren McCullouch. Frank Rosenblatt invented the perceptron, a learning network with a single layer, similar to the old concept of linear regression. Early pioneers also include Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko, Teuvo Kohonen, Stephen Grossberg, Kunihiko Fukushima, Christoph von der Malsburg, David Willshaw, Shun-Ichi Amari, Bernard Widrow, John Hopfield, Eduardo R. Caianiello, and others.

The main categories of networks are acyclic or feedforward neural networks (where the signal passes in only one direction) and recurrent neural networks (which allow feedback and short-term memories of previous input events). Among the most popular feedforward networks are perceptrons, multi-layer perceptrons and radial basis networks.[160] Neural networks can be applied to the problem of intelligent control (for robotics) or learning, using such techniques as Hebbian learning, GMDH or competitive learning.[161]

Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm, which had been around since 1970 as the reverse mode of automatic differentiation published by Seppo Linnainmaa,[162][163] and was introduced to neural networks by Paul Werbos.[164][165][166]

Hierarchical temporal memory is an approach that models some of the structural and algorithmic properties of the neocortex.[167]

Deep learning in artificial neural networks with many layers has transformed many important subfields of artificial intelligence, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and others.[168][169][170]

According to a survey,[171] the expression “Deep Learning” was introduced to the Machine Learning community by Rina Dechter in 1986[172] and gained traction after Igor Aizenberg and colleagues introduced it to Artificial Neural Networks in 2000.[173] The first functional Deep Learning networks were published by Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko and V. G. Lapa in 1965.[174][pageneeded] These networks are trained one layer at a time. Ivakhnenko’s 1971 paper[175] describes the learning of a deep feedforward multilayer perceptron with eight layers, already much deeper than many later networks. In 2006, a publication by Geoffrey Hinton and Ruslan Salakhutdinov introduced another way of pre-training many-layered feedforward neural networks (FNNs) one layer at a time, treating each layer in turn as an unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine, then using supervised backpropagation for fine-tuning. Similar to shallow artificial neural networks, deep neural networks can model complex non-linear relationships. Over the last few years, advances in both machine learning algorithms and computer hardware have led to more efficient methods for training deep neural networks that contain many layers of non-linear hidden units and a very large output layer.[177]

Deep learning often uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs), whose origins can be traced back to the Neocognitron introduced by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980.[178] In 1989, Yann LeCun and colleagues applied backpropagation to such an architecture. In the early 2000s, in an industrial application CNNs already processed an estimated 10% to 20% of all the checks written in the US.[179] Since 2011, fast implementations of CNNs on GPUs have won many visual pattern recognition competitions.[170]

Deep feedforward neural networks were used in conjunction with reinforcement learning by AlphaGo, Google Deepmind’s program that was the first to beat a professional human Go player.[180]

Early on, deep learning was also applied to sequence learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs)[181] which are general computers and can run arbitrary programs to process arbitrary sequences of inputs. The depth of an RNN is unlimited and depends on the length of its input sequence.[170] RNNs can be trained by gradient descent[182][183][184] but suffer from the vanishing gradient problem.[168][185] In 1992, it was shown that unsupervised pre-training of a stack of recurrent neural networks can speed up subsequent supervised learning of deep sequential problems.[186]

Numerous researchers now use variants of a deep learning recurrent NN called the long short-term memory (LSTM) network published by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber in 1997.[187] LSTM is often trained by Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC).[188] At Google, Microsoft and Baidu this approach has revolutionised speech recognition.[189][190][191] For example, in 2015, Google’s speech recognition experienced a dramatic performance jump of 49% through CTC-trained LSTM, which is now available through Google Voice to billions of smartphone users.[192] Google also used LSTM to improve machine translation,[193] Language Modeling[194] and Multilingual Language Processing.[195] LSTM combined with CNNs also improved automatic image captioning[196] and a plethora of other applications.

Control theory, the grandchild of cybernetics, has many important applications, especially in robotics.[197]

AI researchers have developed several specialized languages for AI research, including Lisp,[198] Prolog,[199] Python,[citation needed] and C++.[200]

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a general procedure to test the intelligence of an agent now known as the Turing test. This procedure allows almost all the major problems of artificial intelligence to be tested. However, it is a very difficult challenge and at present all agents fail.[201]

Artificial intelligence can also be evaluated on specific problems such as small problems in chemistry, hand-writing recognition and game-playing. Such tests have been termed subject matter expert Turing tests. Smaller problems provide more achievable goals and there are an ever-increasing number of positive results.[citation needed]

For example, performance at draughts (i.e. checkers) is optimal,[citation needed] performance at chess is high-human and nearing super-human (see computer chess:computers versus human) and performance at many everyday tasks (such as recognizing a face or crossing a room without bumping into something) is sub-human.

A quite different approach measures machine intelligence through tests which are developed from mathematical definitions of intelligence. Examples of these kinds of tests start in the late nineties devising intelligence tests using notions from Kolmogorov complexity and data compression.[202] Two major advantages of mathematical definitions are their applicability to nonhuman intelligences and their absence of a requirement for human testers.

A derivative of the Turing test is the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA). As the name implies, this helps to determine that a user is an actual person and not a computer posing as a human. In contrast to the standard Turing test, CAPTCHA is administered by a machine and targeted to a human as opposed to being administered by a human and targeted to a machine. A computer asks a user to complete a simple test then generates a grade for that test. Computers are unable to solve the problem, so correct solutions are deemed to be the result of a person taking the test. A common type of CAPTCHA is the test that requires the typing of distorted letters, numbers or symbols that appear in an image undecipherable by a computer.

AI is relevant to any intellectual task. Modern artificial intelligence techniques are pervasive and are too numerous to list here. Frequently, when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence; this phenomenon is described as the AI effect.

With social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people and news organisations increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating distribution,[209] major publishers now use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to post stories more effectively and generate higher volumes of traffic.[210]

There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence. The main areas promoted are: general machine intelligence, conversational behavior, data-mining, robotic cars, robot soccer and games.

Artificial intelligence is breaking into the healthcare industry by assisting doctors. According to Bloomberg Technology, Microsoft has developed AI to help doctors find the right treatments for cancer.[211] There is a great amount of research and drugs developed relating to cancer. In detail, there are more than 800 medicines and vaccines to treat cancer. This negatively affects the doctors, because there are too many options to choose from, making it more difficult to choose the right drugs for the patients. Microsoft is working on a project to develop a machine called “Hanover”. Its goal is to memorize all the papers necessary to cancer and help predict which combinations of drugs will be most effective for each patient. One project that is being worked on at the moment is fighting myeloid leukemia, a fatal cancer where the treatment has not improved in decades. Another study was reported to have found that artificial intelligence was as good as trained doctors in identifying skin cancers.[212] Another study is using artificial intelligence to try and monitor multiple high-risk patients, and this is done by asking each patient numerous questions based on data acquired from live doctor to patient interactions.[213]

According to CNN, there was a recent study by surgeons at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington which successfully demonstrated surgery with an autonomous robot. The team supervised the robot while it performed soft-tissue surgery, stitching together a pig’s bowel during open surgery, and doing so better than a human surgeon, the team claimed.[214] IBM has created its own artificial intelligence computer, the IBM Watson, which has beaten human intelligence (at some levels). Watson not only won at the game show Jeopardy! against former champions,[215] but, was declared a hero after successfully diagnosing a women who was suffering from leukemia.[216]

Advancements in AI have contributed to the growth of the automotive industry through the creation and evolution of self-driving vehicles. As of 2016, there are over 30 companies utilizing AI into the creation of driverless cars. A few companies involved with AI include Tesla, Google, and Apple.[217]

Many components contribute to the functioning of self-driving cars. These vehicles incorporate systems such as braking, lane changing, collision prevention, navigation and mapping. Together, these systems, as well as high performance computers, are integrated into one complex vehicle.[218]

Recent developments in autonomous automobiles have made the innovation of self-driving trucks possible, though they are still in the testing phase. The UK government has passed legislation to begin testing of self-driving truck platoons in 2018.[219] Self-driving truck platoons are a fleet of self-driving trucks following the lead of one non-self-driving truck, so the truck platoons aren’t entirely autonomous yet. Meanwhile, the Daimler, a German automobile corporation, is testing the Freightliner Inspiration which is a semi-autonomous truck that will only be used on the highway.[220]

One main factor that influences the ability for a driver-less automobile to function is mapping. In general, the vehicle would be pre-programmed with a map of the area being driven. This map would include data on the approximations of street light and curb heights in order for the vehicle to be aware of its surroundings. However, Google has been working on an algorithm with the purpose of eliminating the need for pre-programmed maps and instead, creating a device that would be able to adjust to a variety of new surroundings.[221] Some self-driving cars are not equipped with steering wheels or brake pedals, so there has also been research focused on creating an algorithm that is capable of maintaining a safe environment for the passengers in the vehicle through awareness of speed and driving conditions.[222]

Another factor that is influencing the ability for a driver-less automobile is the safety of the passenger. To make a driver-less automobile, engineers must program it to handle high risk situations. These situations could include a head on collision with pedestrians. The car’s main goal should be to make a decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrians and saving the passengers in the car. But there is a possibility the car would need to make a decision that would put someone in danger. In other words, the car would need to decide to save the pedestrians or the passengers.[223]The programing of the car in these situations is crucial to a successful driver-less automobile.

Financial institutions have long used artificial neural network systems to detect charges or claims outside of the norm, flagging these for human investigation. The use of AI in banking can be traced back to 1987 when Security Pacific National Bank in USA set-up a Fraud Prevention Task force to counter the unauthorised use of debit cards. Programs like Kasisto and Moneystream are using AI in financial services.

Banks use artificial intelligence systems today to organize operations, maintain book-keeping, invest in stocks, and manage properties. AI can react to changes overnight or when business is not taking place.[224] In August 2001, robots beat humans in a simulated financial trading competition.[225] AI has also reduced fraud and financial crimes by monitoring behavioral patterns of users for any abnormal changes or anomalies.[226]

The use of AI machines in the market in applications such as online trading and decision making has changed major economic theories.[227] For example, AI based buying and selling platforms have changed the law of supply and demand in that it is now possible to easily estimate individualized demand and supply curves and thus individualized pricing. Furthermore, AI machines reduce information asymmetry in the market and thus making markets more efficient while reducing the volume of trades. Furthermore, AI in the markets limits the consequences of behavior in the markets again making markets more efficient. Other theories where AI has had impact include in rational choice, rational expectations, game theory, Lewis turning point, portfolio optimization and counterfactual thinking.

In video games, artificial intelligence is routinely used to generate dynamic purposeful behavior in non-player characters (NPCs). In addition, well-understood AI techniques are routinely used for pathfinding. Some researchers consider NPC AI in games to be a “solved problem” for most production tasks. Games with more atypical AI include the AI director of Left 4 Dead (2008) and the neuroevolutionary training of platoons in Supreme Commander 2 (2010).[228][229]

A platform (or “computing platform”) is defined as “some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run”. As Rodney Brooks pointed out many years ago, it is not just the artificial intelligence software that defines the AI features of the platform, but rather the actual platform itself that affects the AI that results, i.e., there needs to be work in AI problems on real-world platforms rather than in isolation.

A wide variety of platforms has allowed different aspects of AI to develop, ranging from expert systems such as Cyc to deep-learning frameworks to robot platforms such as the Roomba with open interface.[231] Recent advances in deep artificial neural networks and distributed computing have led to a proliferation of software libraries, including Deeplearning4j, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.

Collective AI is a platform architecture that combines individual AI into a collective entity, in order to achieve global results from individual behaviors.[232][233] With its collective structure, developers can crowdsource information and extend the functionality of existing AI domains on the platform for their own use, as well as continue to create and share new domains and capabilities for the wider community and greater good.[234] As developers continue to contribute, the overall platform grows more intelligent and is able to perform more requests, providing a scalable model for greater communal benefit.[233] Organizations like SoundHound Inc. and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have used this collaborative AI model.[235][233]

A McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of 1.5 million highly trained data and AI professionals and managers[236] and a number of private bootcamps have developed programs to meet that demand, including free programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs like General Assembly.[237]

Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have established a non-profit partnership to formulate best practices on artificial intelligence technologies, advance the public’s understanding, and to serve as a platform about artificial intelligence.[238] They stated: “This partnership on AI will conduct research, organize discussions, provide thought leadership, consult with relevant third parties, respond to questions from the public and media, and create educational material that advance the understanding of AI technologies including machine perception, learning, and automated reasoning.”[238] Apple joined other tech companies as a founding member of the Partnership on AI in January 2017. The corporate members will make financial and research contributions to the group, while engaging with the scientific community to bring academics onto the board.[239][233]

There are three philosophical questions related to AI:

Can a machine be intelligent? Can it “think”?

Widespread use of artificial intelligence could have unintended consequences that are dangerous or undesirable. Scientists from the Future of Life Institute, among others, described some short-term research goals to see how AI influences the economy, the laws and ethics that are involved with AI and how to minimize AI security risks. In the long-term, the scientists have proposed to continue optimizing function while minimizing possible security risks that come along with new technologies.[249]

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline:Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. And as many havelost count of how many similar articles theyveseen.Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because theyve become conscious and/or evil.On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers dontworry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, androbots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, its irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AIdoes, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isnt malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans dont generally hate ants, but were more intelligent than they are so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and theres an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines cant have goals.Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target.If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose.If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldnt exclaim: Im not worried, because machines cant have goals!

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids,because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isnt with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines cant control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, its possible that we might also cede control.

At Microsoft, researchers in artificial intelligence are harnessing the explosion of digital data and computational power with advanced algorithms to enable collaborative and natural interactions between people and machines that extend the human ability to sense, learn and understand. The research infuses computers, materials and systems with the ability to reason, communicate and perform with humanlike skill and agility.

Microsofts deep investments in the field are advancing the state of the art in machine intelligence and perception, enabling computers that understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions and interact with their environment. In addition, the companys researchers are thought leaders on the ethics and societal impacts of intelligent technologies. The research, tools and services that result from this investment are woven into existing and new products and, at the same time, made open and accessible to the broader community in a bid to accelerate innovation, democratize AI and solve the worlds most pressing challenges.

Kraken Exchange ReviewKraken is one of the most popular exchanges where users can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. It is arguably the largest Bitcoin exchange, based on liquidity. Kraken was also the first Bitcoin exchange to have its trading price and volume displayed in the “Bloomberg Terminal”.

Having established its reputation in the cryptocurrency world, Kraken is the first choice of many international cryptocurrency traders.

The following table is a Kraken exchange review with all the basic info you need.Kraken.

What is Stellar LumensStellar is an open source network with the same blockchain technology used by bitcoin. But unlike bitcoin, Stellar’s transactions settle in 2 to 5 seconds allowing users to quickly exchange government-backed currencies. Stellar’s native coins are officially called lumens, or xlm. The best way to answer ‘what is Stellar lumens’ is to compare it with Ripple. Stellar lumens (xlm) is to the layman what Ripple (xrp) is to banks and financial institutions.

Crypto Crash 2018: A Correction or Something More Ominous?The sky is falling in the cryptocurrency world, as the prices are in the grips of a painful sell-off. Given the parabolic nature of the rise, investors continue to grapple with the bubble theory.

In a matter of days, the entire basket of cryptocurrencies has shed half of its market capitalization. The carnage has been widespread, and none of the major cryptocurrencies have been spared.

Bearish articles are making the rounds, and cryptocurrencies such as Ripple (XRP) and.

Ripple News UpdateAt the end of last week, it looked like cryptocurrencies would outrun the storm of government regulations bearing down on them. But that analysis was all wrong—it’s now clear that we were sitting in the eye of the storm.

However, the momentary calm wasn’t so bad. It led to a short-lived rally in Ripple prices, which in turn revived some enthusiasm on Reddit and other discussion boards.

Then a barrage of bad news broke over the weekend. Not only did this snap the optimism, but it reminded us that governments are getting.

Making Sense of the Cryptocurrency Crash 2018How eerie is it that exactly 10 days ago, I was sitting in the exact same spot around the exact same time and writing about the possibility of an Ethereum crash? 10 days later, it has occurred and here I am, reiterating my stance. There’s little that has changed in my Ethereum price forecast for 2018 and I can tell you why.

As of now, a cryptocurrency carnage of epic proportions is underway. There’s blood splattered everywhere. Red digits are flashing on computer screens, hearts are sinking,.

Daily Litecoin News UpdateIt’s a quiet day in the cryptocurrency world. The storm has settled and the sun is out. Investors are finally out of choppy waters and trading with more peace of mind. Top cryptos, including Litecoin are trading in the green. At this point another piece of good news may serve as the icing on the cake that Litecoin investors may have been longing to taste.

Litecoin founder Charlie Lee updates from the headquarters that Litecoin’s next upgrade is on its way. As promised, the developers will be cutting down transaction fees to further make LTC transactions cheaper for users.

Later, he also updates that Litecoin, like Bitcoin, would be integrating.

Ripple News UpdateCryptocurrencies passed through all stages of Dante’s Inferno this week, but that doesn’t mean investors are confined to hell in perpetuity. There is a way out, and its name is Big Business.

Or to put it in crypto terms, “enterprise use-cases of blockchain technology may expedite token adoption” by “leveraging the power of existing institutions.” (My god, this industry needs better language.)

What am I talking about?

Let me explain…

When the market crashes, investors believe that cryptocurrencies are failing. This is true in some cases and horribly untrue in others.Ripple (XRP) Price Chart.

Ethereum Price ForecastGiven the recent rollercoaster in Ethereum prices, it’s time to consider what makes ETH more valuable than the 1,400 other cryptocurrencies on the market. I call this theory “trickle-down cryptonomics”—others call it “fat protocol theory.”

What am I talking about?

To put it simply, Ethereum’s greatest strength is that it serves as a launching pad for other cryptos. Namely, cryptos that operate as part of decentralized applications (DApps).

DApps are identical to regular apps, except for one small difference—they.

Ethereum News UpdateFrom the outside, all digital assets look the same. A lot of volatility. A lot of upside potential. Not a lot of variety.

This two-dimensional view of cryptocurrencies is pretty common among newbie investors, but experienced hands know it’s not true. There’s a world of difference between Monero and XRP, or between NEM and Dash. Cryptos are not one and the same.

Investors learn these nuances over time. Another important lesson is about “safe-haven assets.”

Daily Litecoin News UpdateA dark cloud is once again hanging over crypto-land. After two days of recovery following the massive crash, cryptocurrencies are back in the red zone. But this cloud has a silver lining that investors must not miss.

Here are three major negative headlines that have sparked pessimism in the crypto-world in the past couple days.

First, South Korea continued the tradition by leading the charge against cryptocurrencies. To begin with, South Korea’s largest bank will no longer be supporting bank accounts linked with cryptocurrency exchanges.

Secondly, the largest Korean exchange, Korbit, says it will no longer be entertaining.

Ethereum News UpdateAll this week, a dark cloud hung over cryptocurrency markets. It was caused by the first batch of Bitcoin futures contracts coming due…and investors having no idea what to expect from the fallout.

But then the contract was settled. The world continued spinning on its axis, and the sun still rose in the east. Nothing much had changed. (Source: “Milestone: Cboe’s First Bitcoin Futures Contract Expired Today,” CoinDesk, January 17,.